#truby

i love them

Heart of Stone - Six

But I took your hand, promised I'd withstand / Any blaze you blew my way / 'Cause something inside, it solidified / And I knew I'd always stay

Juliet - Cavetown

But I need to understand / When I can power through / And when I need some help from you / When I should stand my ground / And when I need to just sit down / Sometimes I act like I know / But I'm really just a kid

Safe and Sound - Capital Cities

I could show you love / In a tidal wave of mystery / You'll still be standing next to me / You could be my luck / Even if we're six feet underground / I know that we'll be safe and sound

Five Years Time - Noah and The Whale

Dean and Cas: 

A brother/buddy or a romantic relationship?

I just literally just had this conversation with @godshipsit & @floralmotif today :)

So, according to Truby’s Character Technique we have a difference between a romance and a buddy story which are the 2 relationships he talks about (I take brothers as buddies as the key is the romance part and, just, no) that I will summarise here (full details follow the link):

1. Love story: The central concept of love stories is quite profound. Love stories say that a person does not become a true individual by being alone. A person becomes a unique and authentic individual only by entering into a community of two. It is through the love of the other that each person grows and becomes his or her deepest self.

(PS IM DYING AT THE USE OF THE WORD PROFOUND. I CANNOT FLAIL ANYMORE. IM DEAD).

2. Buddy story: The buddy strategy allows you essentially to cut the hero into two parts, showing two different approaches to life and two sets of talents. These two characters are “married” into a team in such a way that the audience can see their differences but also see how these differences actually help them work well together, so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. As in the love story, one of the buddies should be more central than the other. The buddy is a kind of double of the hero, similar in important ways but also different. 

These are quite similar but there is a clear line between the two:

The community of two: It is through the love of the other that each person grows and becomes his or her deepest self. They have a deep, profound impact on the CORE CHARACTERISTICS of the other, not one or two top level changes / improvements to their character but it goes deep, to the CORE of what we characterise them as.

Note how relevant this difference between the romantic v brotherly/buddy relationship is to Sam/Dean who are kind of a weird amalgamation between the two for narrative reasons of this show, but remember that the endgame for Sam and Dean is different, they want different things (I could bang on about this for hours, but it's canon, it's repeatedly and consistently referenced on both sides through the years to hammer the point home) therefore their endgames are in fact to END the codependency and have a happy healthy relationship apart from each other,or at least, not on top of each other and not codependent. 

Thus they can’t enter a community of two and become their deepest selves together, which makes perfect sense because they haven’t yet done it in 12 years of being together, precicely because they’re both holding each other back (see every time Sam tries to get out of hunting and Dean drags him back in, see every time Dean gets close to Cas and looks warily at Sam before no-homo-ing his way out etc etc etc).

So, you must detail the needs of both characters at the beginning of the story…

~ Dean doesn’t have faith in God, Angels or himself 

~ Cas is a soldier and Angel of the Lord with authority issues, used as a soldier but he canonically just wants to help and save people when given the chance

~ Dean has abandonment issues 

~ Cas wants somewhere to belong

- Dean has codependency issues with his brother and sexuality / various character repression issues from his childhood

~ God makes Dean pancakes and has faith in Dean because Dean is the ‘firewall between Light and Darkness’, Dean represents Free Will and Humanity, Dean and Cas came to Chuck and Cas told him ‘we’re making up as we go’, because Dean taught him Free Will (the circle is complete, it completes me *satisfied face*). 

~ Dean starts to believe in himself and has faith in/textually prays to Cas 

~ Cas rebels and does it, all of it, for Dean  

~ Cas ignores God and has faith in Dean 

~ Cas always comes back to Dean

~ Cas knows he belongs with Dean and Sam (they’re his family). He becomes part of TFW: hunting things, saving people, the family business.

~ I also believe Dean’s codependency issues and repression issues are being addressed this season, these are more relevant to Mary though, but they absolutely are relevant to Cas and I really do see him coming into play around the sexuality issue of course but also as Cas is canonically supportive of Dean in his lowest moments and Dean opens to him more than anyone, see the Gadreel torture scene, the burger date etc etc (and Crowley to a point, who is a Cas mirror).

In conclusion, Dean and Cas are canonically central to each other’s CORE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT and their endgames are INTERLINKED.